What is a cross section team?

Cross section teams make it possible to view and discuss the responses of selected employees in additional evaluation units. These teams are suitable for cross-regional project teams or agile scrum teams, for example.

To better understand what cross section teams are, we have an illustrative (though not entirely serious) example for you:

Imagine you want to summarize the feedback of all hat wearers in your company. But there are people wearing hats in all teams - in some teams only one team member wears a hat, in other teams you will find several hat lovers.

How do you manage to summarize the feedback of all employees wearing hats?
That's right: with a cross section team.

With the cross section team "hat lovers" you can gather the feedback of all hat wearers at a glance and find out if there are special issues that this group of employees is concerned about (e.g. the desire for storage facilities for hats in every office).

Create a cross section team

Before cross section teams can be created, an administrator enable this feature in the "My Company" --> "Company Settings" tab under "Team Settings":

Add a new cross section team

After enabling the "cross section teams" feature, administrators can choose to create a normal or a cross section team when creating a new team. The procedure for creating a cross section team is similar to that of a normal team: In the "Teams" tab, new teams can be created using the "+ Add Team" button.

As with normal teams, each cross section team is given a meaningful name, at least one team leader, and several team members (note: the evaluation limits of the company account also apply to your cross section teams). We recommend that you do not create cross section teams that are too small and, if possible, assign at least 10 team members to each cross section team.

Unlike normal teams, with a cross section team you can only select which questionnaires you want to display in the cross section team, but you cannot start or stop surveys here or specify a date for the next survey.

Attention: You can only select question cataloges that are actively used by all team members (in their main team).

Cross section teams are merely additional evaluation units.
The surveys are scheduled, started and stopped exclusively in normal teams. 

Evaluation conditions

teamecho also pays the utmost attention to the anonymity of all participants in cross section teams. In order to avoid drawing conclusions about individual employees by comparing different team evaluations, teamecho prevents the display of results in a specific cross section team if the anonymity of individual employees is endangered by possible conclusions.

The display of results in cross section teams can therefore be

• invalid,
• valid for an overview evaluation (= no detailed evaluation) or
• valid for the detailed evaluation.

The respective evaluation option of a cross section team is indicated in the team overview by a green, yellow or red banner.

• The "Detailed Evaluation" shows you the usual dashboard, where you can see everything down to the answer distribution of the individual questions. 
  Exception: Comments are only displayed here if they have been explicitly released by the comment author for the evaluation of the cross section team. See the paragraph on "Comments in cross section teams" below.
  
• The banner "No Detailed Evaluation" (=overview evaluation) shows you the evaluation dashboard without the details of the answer distribution of individual questions and without comments.
  
  
• With the banner "Invalid" you have no insight into the evaluation of the questions, the dashboard is therefore not visible.

Criteria for displaying an overview evaluation:

• All team members of the cross section team have an active survey plan for the selected question set at the same interval and progress.
• The cross section team has at least 4 team members.
• All team members can be from the same team.
• If multiple cross section teams are created: cross section teams with the same question set must differ by at least two team members.
• A team member can be assigned to a maximum of five different cross section teams with the same question catalog.

Criteria for displaying a detailed evaluation:

• The cross section team has at least 5 team members.
• The team members of the cross section team come from at least two different normal teams.
• The cross section team must contain at least two members of each included normal team (Attention: If your cross-section team consists of only two different teams, you have to deposit at least two team members from one team and three team members from the other team).
• Each normal team whose members are included in a cross section team must have at least two team members who are NOT represented in the cross section team.
• A team member can be included in a maximum of two different cross section teams with the same set of questions.

Comments in cross section teams

Team members in cross section teams can file comments in the cross section teams to discuss the results or leave additional feedback. This function must be activated in advance by an administrator in the "My Company" --> "Company settings" under "Configuration".

Team members can use this function to decide for themselves whether they want to write a comment in a cross section team or a normal team - however, this option is only available if the display of the detailed evaluation is permitted in the cross section team.

Cross section teams can seem complicated at the beginning - but our Customer Happiness team is always there to assist you with helpful tips and information. Contact us - we're happy to help!